Mirrors

Whenever I look into the mirror, I receive a shock. I am shocked by the way my body looks. The way I feel, the way I move, the way I look at myself from above (no mirror) is strikingly different from the way I look and move in the mirror, or on video. I've never felt like I move slowly or heavily, but I look so awkward when I'm able to watch myself. I don't feel as big as I look in the mirror. And so, every time I look, I'm jolted back to reality.

And so I avoided looking into the mirror, for a long time. Lately, I've been looking more and more often into the mirror, trying to find something to like. At first, I saw very little. For example, I like my eyes. I think I have pretty eyes. I like my nose. It's not too big, not too small. I like my mouth; I like the shape and color of my lips. I like my glasses, but I can't take too much credit for those. Didn't like much beyond those though. Very recently, I'm starting to get used to looking at myself in the mirror. I realized a few days ago that I like my skin tone: I'm not pasty white, but I'm no where near tan. I wouldn't even say I'm in the middle; somewhere between the middle and pasty white.

And so I've gotten to thinking. Why is there such a disconnect between the way I feel and the way I look? Am I really as big as I look? By whose standards am I judging, exactly? Is there a way for me to capitalize on not feeling so big as I look?

I'm going to take a shot at the first question right now. I think this disconnect was formed by our dieting, fat-hating culture. It has somehow created a gap, a gulf, between me and me. Me being the way I feel. Me being the outside, the way other people and myself see me. Somehow, me has remained untouched, but only sort of. I still think I'm fat, and I still have a hard time letting go of the idea of dieting. That part of me has been touched. But other parts haven't. (I'm probably not making any sense at this point. Bare with me. Or me.)

I don't know what my own standards of fat are. What I should say now is that it doesn't matter: there shouldn't be a standard at all. Probably true. But I think it's important to understand whose standards are whose so that I can identify what needs to change and whose standards I should begin to listen to. My own standards are probably best; the most informed, researched, and tested standards are probably even better. But I'm not sure that the latter exists yet.

Fat acceptance means that I need to start putting "fat" and "normal" into the same sentence more often. It's okay to be fat; it's normal. Just like it's okay to be black. Or female. Or short or tall, or blue-eyed or brown-eyed. It's normal, it happens, and its (mostly) outside my control. Short women can put on high-heels to get taller; men can get surgery to become women; anyone can put on a pair of contacts to change their eye color; and a fat person can overcome their weight if they are (1) lucky, (2) patient, and (3) unreasonably determined, perhaps to the point of obsession.

But I don't think weight is something to overcome. When I'm not looking in the mirror, I feel pretty good, for the most part. I should maximize this, so that the feeling spreads. I can do that by eating better, exercising more, educating myself, and learning to love my body. (It's so strange to type that - "learning to love my body." It shouldn't be.) Once I can appreciate my own body can I begin to push back on my culture's hatred of my body. Once I can reconcile the way I feel with the way I look - by learning that my fat body is normal and maybe even attractive - can I approach the rest of the world about it.

Fat and PCOS

I ran across this Q&A on The-F-Word (emphasis mine, except for the question itself):

How does one go about practicing Health at Every Size with a chronic condition (e.g. PCOS, a thyroid problem, diabetes, fibromyalgia, etc.) or special-needs diet (gluten-free, low-sugar, etc..)?

Lifestyle changes such as diet adjustments and increased movement are often important to improve chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, PCOS and other conditions. But a focus on weight loss is not important and often damaging.

Research shows that changes in diet and physical activity result in health improvement (lower blood glucose, lower blood lipids, lower blood pressure) with no or little weight loss. Also, the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study published in August 2006 showed that people in the overweight BMI category (BMI 25 – 29.9) had the least risk of premature death. And most epidemiological studies show that weight loss is associated with a greater risk of premature death by up to 260%. This may be due to chronic dieting and weight cycling which is associated with a much greater risk of cardiovascular disease.

Also, if diet changes are necessary for health conditions, it is important to avoid any unnecessary restriction leading to feeling deprived. For instance, instead of giving up high fat desserts, why not shop for yummy high fat desserts containing high quality fats. And contrary to common belief, high fat foods do not lead to weight gain above natural weight if eaten when hungry (and neither do high carbohydrate foods). Usually, people feel most satisfied when eating all three major nutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrate) at meals.

Reading this left me feeling...strange. Like a void has been partially filled. I know nearly nothing about PCOS and what its relationship with my weight is. All I know is that weight gain is a common symptom of PCOS (about half of women with PCOS are overweight - but who knows how "overweight" is defined), and that 77% of one's weight is determined by genetics. So how much of my weight is genetic, how much is PCOS, and how much is my life style and environment? I don't know.

When my OBGYN diagnosed me with PCOS, she told me that I should try to lose weight. As I thought more about how to go about doing this, I realized something. If weight gain is a symptom of PCOS, how on earth does losing weight address the root cause? In fact, I'm not the only one that's been told this. So has Branwyn, at A Day in the (Fat) Life:

One doctor, the one who finally diagnosed me with PCOS, still told me to lose weight, and it would cure the PCOS. Ummm, okay. Since obesity is one of the symptoms of PCOS, I want to know how that works.

I've been reading a lot of fat acceptance blogs lately, and so many of their stories are the same as my own, and I've read so many things that feel good to read, that make me feel like all of this PCOS stuff isn't so hopeless. Perhaps I am doomed to be fat the rest of my life. I'm starting to feel like maybe that's not bad. That's okay. I can be okay with that. I can get used to that. Maybe I can even learn to enjoy it. The alternative looks a lot worse to me. I don't want my weight to be a constant struggle for the rest of my life. Learning not to hate myself and my weight because of some things out of my control sounds pretty good, actually.

So here's where I can take control. I can be healthy. Being fat and being healthy are not mutually exclusive. I can do both. Eating healthy (not the same as dieting) and exercise do not have to have a goal of weight loss. They can just have a goal of overall good health. Won't that help my PCOS more than merely reducing an arbitrary number that doesn't accurately measure my overall health in the first place?

When I was a kid...

...another kid called me "fat" during gym class, and I unleashed a torrent of abuse in response. I possibly punched him. I actually don't remember.

No one in gym class called me fat again. In fact, no one at all has called me fat since (except for me).

I knew he was right. But I knew that he didn't have any right to observe my fatness to me outloud, in public, joking or not.

So I yelled at him. I'm glad I did.

Healthy vs. Thin

Consider the following:

1. Joe (the Plumber?) is thin.
2. Thin people are healthy.
3. Joe is healthy.

1. Bob (the Builder?) is fat.
2. Fat people are unhealthy.
3. Bob is unhealthy.

That's dictated to us from birth by our American culture. Makes sense, right? No knee-jerk reaction, right?

Well, I don't agree with it. There's evidence of it all around me, and you too. My partner is a great example. He is thin - ungodly thin - but he's not healthy. He's malnourished. Are anorexic people healthy? What about fat people that exercise regularly and maintain a healthy diet? (Yes, they do exist.) Fat and healthy are not mutually exclusive. Weight is not the single measure of health.

Part of the "fat acceptance" movement is teaching this fact to others. The other part is learning how to live in a fat body and not hate it or yourself at the same time. After one can learn to love themselves, it becomes easier to take on the rest of the world.

And part of learning to love yourself is learning to let go of dieting. Most people (not all) cannot lose (or gain) significant amounts of weight and keep it off. Each individual body has a range of weight that it's happiest and healthiest in. In fact, if a body goes too far below or above that range, the metabolism slows down or speeds up in order to get back into that range. This causes fat people to get fat again and thin people to get thin again, over the course of several months. In fact:

[F]at people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

(Emphasis mine.) What does this mean? It means that different bodies need different things. And there's nothing wrong with that. But here's where there is something wrong:

The Rockefeller subjects [who, through hardcore dieting, lost significant amounts of weight] also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. [...]

"It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals."

It's unhealthy for a naturally fat person to try to keep weight off. What about success stories?

There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life's work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.

People that do keep the weight off have the drive and will power to always be worried about staying thin. I don't want staying thin to be my life's work. There might be some people that want that. I don't. I'd rather learn to appreciate the body I'm in, and I'd rather learn to keep this body healthy, whatever healthy means to it. And I'm pretty sure starvation isn't healthy, no matter what you look like.

Fatphobia

I, like the vast majority of my culture, have fallen for the rule that Fat Women Are Gross. And I, as part of a tiny minority of my culture, am learning that that just isn't true. I'm not sure what I weigh now. I know I'm over 200 pounds, but I'm not sure how much over. I'm 5'5". I describe myself as "chubby" when I'm feeling optimistic, and "fat" when I'm not. Before I move on, I'm willing to bet that you've already made the assumption that I eat a lot more than I should and that I'm sexually starved.

Headline: Woman Eats Brownies, Gets Laid.

Well, here's the thing. To be honest, I don't know if I eat more than I should. Not anymore. I used to think so. But now I'm not so sure how much of that is our society dictating belief without evidence. (However, I do know that I do not eat healthily, and that likely has a lot to do with my weight.)

If I do eat more than I should, it's not because I'm sexually starved; it's not a substitute. Nor does being fat make me grossly unattractive. I get laid a lot. Couple times a week. I love every minute of it, and I have a strong suspicion that my partner does too. (If you just grossed out, then stop and think about what you just did, what prejudices you are host to, and why you think that way.) I don't eat food because food is a substitute for something that's missing in my life - I just like food. I like food like I enjoy listening to music, or coding, or writing, or reading. I just like it.

The other thing that deserves mentioning is the fact that I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). One of the major symptoms of PCOS is weight gain. So it's not just me and my love for food, healthy or unhealthy (and I can tell you that it's never safe to assume that it's that simple with other overweight women too).

The truth is - there are some men and women who are genuinely sexually attracted to the kind of woman that you would not find in a Playboy magazine. Big women. Non-thin, non-slender, non-skinny, non-lithe women. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more people that find large women attractive than society thinks. When I got to college and stopped wearing clothing that hid my body, I began to see a lot more interest from my fellow students than I'd ever dreamed of in high school. I need two hands to count the number of individuals that showed more-than-just-friends interest in me. I never thought I'd need more than a finger or two for that. In fact, before reaching college, I had become very comfortable with the idea of being single (with lots of cats) for the rest of my life. And all my boyfriend says is, "You're gorgeous. I'm obviously not the only one that thinks so." I still have a hard time with this concept; I'm still learning a lot about how my body isn't ugly like society seems to think it is.

But the amount of people out there that still think fat people are bad far outnumber the people that don't. And that's a huge problem, pun unintended. The truth is that fat isn't always bad. There is no "epidemic." Some people happen to be fat, just as some people happen to be thin, and while environment and the food you eat has a lot to do with it, genetics has about 77% to do with it. That's right: 77%. Not to mention that diets not only don't work, but could do more harm than good.

My Deconversion Story

A recent post of Greta Christina's, inspired, somehow, by a comment I made on a previous post, poses a question: "If you're a non-believer in religion, and you used to be a believer -- what changed your mind? Was there one particular argument or incident or experience? Or was it more of a general softening of the ground, with lots of different factors adding up?" As I read through the comments responding to the question, I realized that I have not examined my own "deconversion" very much.

Before getting into my personal story, it is highly relevant to first talk about my parents, and it is well known that religion is most easily propagated through family ties. My mother has been a Protestant Christian for all her life, so far as I know, albeit a very casual one. She doesn't attend church anymore, but she did when my sister and I were kids - but even then, I would still call her a casual Christian. So my sister and I went to Sunday school and church services with her. She never "forced" her views on my sister and I; indeed, she never talked to us about God, Jesus, church, or what any of it meant outside of church. We just went to church because that was the routine. My father grew up Christian but left before I was born, I believe. When I was old enough to begin to really critically think about religion, I found that my dad was Taoist. By this time, I had stopped going to church with my mother, and my dad had divorced his second wife. More recently, I believe Dad would call himself a Buddhist now. (Yes, I just checked his Facebook (he's ahead of his generation. :P), where he identifies himself as "Buddhist - Mahayana.") Both my ex- and my current stepmothers are Christian, but in very different ways. My ex-stepmother was similar to my mom, sorta. She would take us to church on holidays (dress us up and everything), but not on Sundays. She had Lutheran missionaries come to the house to teach us about their side of the story (more on this and its affect on me later). My current stepmother does not go to church at all; she does not go with the "organized" part of religion at all. Her faith is mostly centered on Jesus himself, if I recall her own words correctly. Therefore, I have not spoken much about her faith with her, as it is very private to her (and that's fine with me).

So, in essence, I grew up with mostly the Christian theology as a part of my life, but not a very big one, certainly, and not one that even elicited thought from me for some time. I don't think I ever really believed any of it. It was just something that my parents expected me to do, I thought. Mom never talked about it, my ex-stepmother never talked about it outside of church, and my current stepmother chooses not to talk about it for her own reasons (and again, that's more than okay); really, only my dad talked about his Taoism and Buddhism. So I grew up with a cursory knowledge of Christianity; I knew more about Taoism and Buddhism, really. I enjoyed the world religions portion of the AP World History course. My high school friends were a wide variety of theologies and non-theologies: one atheist, one Jehova's Witness, one Lutheran, one Protestant, one Catholic, and one - I think - Wiccan (but we never talked about our religious leanings, so religion never caused any riffs). So religion was basically a subject in school, something that was not of importance or reverance in my life. No one ever asked me what belief system I adhered to, no one really questioned why we were going to church if we didn't believe in it (or even if we did - I didn't question that either).

But I just didn't like Sunday school or church. All I saw there was fanataicsm, with no evidence, just singing, reading, a crazy guy talking incessantly up in front, a lot of silly and adolescent stories from this nifty Bible thing, coloring books and toys, and it all bothered me. No one gave me any reason to "believe" in anything, and now that I think about it, I don't know that anyone ever really told me to believe in anything. It was all there as if I already believed. My memories are framed as if I were an outsider, behind a camera or reading about my past in a magazine. No one held me accountable for my belief or disbelief.

So when my sister and I finally started to complain to our mother, not wanting to go, she essentially shrugged, and we stopped going. It really didn't take much. She still went to church herself, and she still attended a singles group that operated out of the church, but she never made us go again.

But we weren't about to try the same on our ex-stepmother. The Lutheran missionaries are by far the most memorable to me. My ex-stepmother wanted my sister and I to learn about other people's faiths - I strange thing to want in retrospect. (I don't know if this was the beginning of a grand plan to meet with missionaries of all faiths that never got off the ground, or if Lutheranism was the only other faith worth talking about.) Only Diana, my sister, and I sat through these talks; my dad and our two stepbrothers were no where to be found. The fact that our stepbrothers didn't have to sit through this irked me to no end. It wasn't fair, and I knew they didn't have to sit through it because they simply didn't want to. They didn't go to the holiday church services either, and they didn't say prayers at the dinner table. They were special. But the Lutheran missionaries didn't last long; we only saw them a handful of times.

By the time I learned what agnosticism and atheism were, I was ready to call myself one. I had no affinity with religion or its followers; I hadn't had a million positive experiences with them; no one had bothered to make me feel included or to tell me why I should want to be included in the first place. In fact, the most positive they ever got were exclusively with the conversations about Taoism and Buddhism with Dad. I learned about those belief systems without feeling pressured to "convert"; I just got to learn about what my dad's system was and why he liked it. And that was cool with me.

Much later in life, less than a year ago, I had the first conversation with my mother about her beliefs. She's frustrated, sad, and confused by Christianity. She doesn't understand how God could have allowed the divorce to happen. If I didn't feel so bad for making her think about it, I would talk about it with her more often.

Why am I agnostic and not atheist? Well, simply put, because I haven't seen enough evidence yet. I'm working on another post that addresses this in more detail.

Please note that by NO MEANS is this post an invitation for a conversion! I'm a very happy agnostic. I am not ripe for the picking. However, I would love to discuss religion with you. Just don't think you're going to get an easy convert out of it.

The Blogosphere

There's something captivating about the blogosphere. As its importance and influence has grown, I have watched, captivated, wishing I could be a part of it, a voice in it. But the wonder of the blogosphere is that I can, at my own will. I don't even really have to have anything unique or intriguing to say. However, I have no intention of filling posts up with trivialities - unless, of course, they are relevant because they are trivialities.

This blog will be about my thoughts and experiences regarding the following:

• Atheism, agnosticism, and (organized) religion in general;
• Feminism;
• Technology;
  
• Sex and love, both of the gay and straight nature;
• Politics; and
  
• My cat.

Sorry, but I have to sneak my cat in there somewhere, as the other topics are so dull and heavy.

At any rate, I am an agnostic, feminist, straight, liberal woman, born in 1986. I am currently a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology as an information technology major; I plan to graduate in May of 2009. There may be bumps in posting between now and my graduation; I tend to throw myself into school when I am taking courses.

I don't know where the title came from exactly, but I feel like Nowoman's Land is about where I live right now. I post this, of course, at the height of the 2008 election season; Sarah Palin has been announced as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, and I am livid about the choice and what it means for women. Perhaps that's where the title came from. More on the election (and Sarah Palin) later though. We'll save that for a whole 'nother post.

Posts may be anything from reactions to a linked news article or blog post to commentary about an experience or event and how it relates to the above topics. I really don't have any concrete plans for this blog, other than it will be intellectual, and hopefully not mundane or insipid. I would like to encourage a readership of thoughtful, questioning, and uncommon people. I hope that I am thoughtful, questioning, and uncommon enough myself.